Utilitarianism, for all the unfortunate connotations of the word
(which conjures up images of factories, high-rise buildings and
all things ugly-but-functional), is an ethical system of great elegance
and beauty. It is also a system of great importance: I would guess
that the large majority of people in our society are more or less
utilitarians, and that they are such without having given the
matter a moment's thought.

It arouses strong feelings. Most proponents of utilitarianism
would probably say that it's not only right, but obviously
right; that those who are not utilitarians are living in the
Dark Ages. Many of its opponents consider it a thoroughly evil
thing, tending to lead to the erosion of vital moral principles.
I think both sides exaggerate.

The issue is a particularly interesting one for the Christian:
utilitarianism has much in common, in practice, with Christian
ethics, but little or nothing in common with Christian philosophy.

This essay will attempt to analyse the idea of utilitarianism
(which is more complicated, and richer, than it may seem at
first glance), and to explain what I think is wrong with it and
what I think is right with it. At the end, there are some rather
disorganised comments about what a really adequate system of
ethics would have to look like.

This sounds like an easy question. "The greatest good of the greatest
number". Simple. Or is it? In any real situation, there are many people
involved; they will all be affected in different ways; there is no
reason why the "greatest number" should receive the "greatest good".

What is usually meant in practice by that slogan is something like
the following procedure for choosing between two or more actions.

Look at the state of the world after each action.
Look in particular at the level of happiness of each person
in the various situations.

Add up, somehow, those levels of happiness in each case.

Compare the results. The one which leads to the maximum
total happiness is the (morally) right one.

The thing to notice about this is that it actually involves a lot
of quite separate principles. I think it is fair to say that they
are all part of the idea of utilitarianism; a system of ethics is
utilitarian in so far as it accepts some or more of these principles.
Someone who accepts some of them but not others may reasonably be
called a utilitarian, even if the procedure above would be seen by
them as a coarse caricature.

Actions, as such, have no moral value. What matters is their
effect on the state of the world.

In fact, the only aspect of the state of the world which has
any direct moral significance is the happiness or misery
of people. (Or, optionally, of arbitrary creatures; perhaps
animals matter too in some way.)

In particular, only individuals matter. The only relevance of
the state of a family or a society is the effect it has on
its individual members.

All people are, ethically speaking, equal, in all situations.
One person's happiness is precisely as important as another's.
(For animals, the situation is less clear.)

It is possible to measure happiness, in the required sense, on
some sort of linear scale.

It is possible to add up different people's degrees of happiness,
producing a meaningful "total happiness". And, again, the results
can meaningfully be compared.

There is at least one important issue which we haven't addressed so
far: we have to consider the entire future of the universe in order
to make our decision. I shall consider the practical difficulties of
this later; there is also a theoretical issue: we are presumably
required to compute the total amount of happiness in a person's
entire lifetime. So we need some sort of integral calculus for
happiness.

I shall refer to different versions of utilitarianism as stronger
or weaker according as they accept more or fewer of the principles
above. "Strong utilitarianism", simpliciter, will mean the complete
system above in all its glory. Most utilitarians are not in this
sense strong utilitarians.

Utilitarianism has the awkward property of seeming entirely obvious
to its proponents, and clearly wrong to its opponents. This can make
for discussions with much more heat than light. If it already seems
obvious to you that utilitarianism is right, by all means skip this
section.

There are no ethical first principles which are agreed on by everyone.
On the other hand, there is a striking level of agreement about what
is actually right and wrong, in concrete cases. Of course, there are
disagreements; anthropologists have turned up some pretty surprising
ones. But there is something pretty close to a consensus that (in most
cases) murder, lying, rape and theft are bad, and that (in most
cases) generosity, healing, truthfulness and loyalty are good.

One obvious thing that these things have in common is that most of
the things near-universally agreed to be good are things which
make people happy, and most of the things near-universally agreed
to be bad are things which make people miserable. And in most
exceptional cases, there is a clear recognition that they are
exceptional cases: excuses are made.

Furthermore, the actions usually reckoned to be the worst are often
the ones which cause the most suffering. Rape, for instance, which
causes lasting psychological trauma as well as involving physical
injury, is generally reckoned to be morally much worse than theft.

So, utilitarianism seems to do a pretty good job of giving the right
answers. There is also a theoretical justification for (at least)
something rather like utilitarianism. It seems clear to me that,
all else being equal, something which makes me happy is better than
something which doesn't. After all, that's one way in which I make
decisions (though, to be sure, I wouldn't in such cases call them
moral decisions). Since it seems plausible that all people are ethically
equal, this means that anything which makes anyone happy is (all else
being equal) better than something which does not. This seems to lead
naturally to something very like utilitarianism.

I am not writing exclusively for Christians, so I'm going to avoid,
where possible, arguments that just say "Christianity says X;
utilitarianism implies not-X; so utilitarianism is wrong".

However, what I've called strong utilitarianism has a terrible
problem: it is grossly inconsistent with ethical intution (or, at
least, with my ethical intuition) in certain cases.

For instance, suppose that (never mind how; all that matters is
that it should be conceivable) I could, by subjecting my aged
grandmother to the most appalling tortures (which I shall leave
to your imagination, should you happen to have that sort of
imagination), relieve a sufficiently large number of people from
one minute's toothache. No matter how small the amount of suffering
from which each person is thus delivered, and no matter how great
the amount I cause to my grandmother, if the number of people is
large enough then the total amount of suffering in the world will
be decreased by this transaction. Therefore I ought to torture
my grandmother. This, it seems to me, is unacceptable.

Of course, there are ways round this problem. For instance, we could
model happiness and misery with a modified number system, containing
values incommensurable in the sense that no integer multiple of one
was as big as the other (for mathematicians: in other words, we could
work with a non-archimedean valuation). Or we could replace the idea
of adding up utilities with some other operation: take the single
biggest happiness or misery, and just look at that, or something.
(Actually, either this second option actually reduces to the first,
or else it doesn't work. Proof left as an exercise to the reader.)

So, we can get around that particular problem. Alas, there are others,
though I wouldn't claim any of them as an actual refutation of (weak)
utilitarianism. I shall take the utilitarian principles I enumerated
above, and describe some objections to them.

Actions, as such, have no moral value. What matters is their
effect on the state of the world.

Is this really plausible? It doesn't seem so to me. If I kill
someone, isn't there something intrinsically bad about that,
even if (as might be the case) the killing turns out to be right
in terms of maximising utility? I think most people would agree
that a killing of this sort would be at best a necessary evil.

In fact, the only aspect of the state of the world which has
any direct moral significance is the happiness or misery
of people. (Or, optionally, of arbitrary creatures; perhaps
animals matter too in some way.)

Suppose I tell a defamatory lie about you to an acquaintance of
mine, who has never had and never will have any sort of interaction
with you, and swear him to secrecy. This makes no difference whatever
to your future happiness. Does that make it OK? It seems clear to me
that it doesn't (and if you disagree, there is really nothing I can
say to convince you).

Isn't there, in fact, something fundamentally good about truth
and bad about falsehood? Some such idea seems to underlie the
near-universal agreement that lying is in itself bad.

And what about, say, someone who takes great pleasure in
annoying other people? Suppose I get enormous satisfaction
from causing you minor but genuine unpleasantness. Does that
mean that it's right for me to do so?

In particular, only individuals matter. The only relevance of
the state of a family or a society is the effect it has on
its individual members.

I wouldn't like to claim that this is obviously wrong. But is it
really obviously right?

All people are, ethically speaking, equal, in all situations.
One person's happiness is precisely as important as another's.

What about criminals? If I am in the process of raping your wife,
do you really have to consider my well-being as carefully as your
wife's in deciding how to go about stopping me? (Perhaps the answer
is "yes". It certainly doesn't seem like an easy question to answer.)

It is possible to measure happiness, in the required sense, on
some sort of linear scale.

It is possible to add up different people's degrees of happiness,
producing a meaningful "total happiness". And, again, the results
can meaningfully be compared.

These two principles, taken together, give rise to the problem in the
previous section. But there is another problem. Is it really obvious
that different sorts of happiness are commensurable? How do you compare
the pleasure person A gets from an hour of wild sex with his wife,
the contentment person B has from the knowledge that his money in the
bank is earning him piles of interest for his retirement, the wonder
person C feels on contemplating the starry sky, the thrill person D
has when listening to her favourite piece of music, person E's enjoyment
of an evening listening to a stand-up comic, and so on? And how do you
weigh those up against person P's toothache, person Q's unhappy marriage,
person R's fear of cancer, person S's resentment of unfair treatment
long ago, person T's frustration at having spent three weeks chasing
a bug in his computer program? I don't know, that's for sure. I don't
even know how to do similar comparisons when all the people involved
are myself: in difficult cases it feels a lot more like tossing a coin
than like choosing the best of a neatly ordered set of options.

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that all those problems are
resolved, and that I'm fully persuaded that utilitarianism (of your
favourite variety) is correct. I now have a decision to make; for
instance, I have to decide whether to cycle home in the dark without
lights (thus endangering a few people slightly, maybe) or to be late
home (thus upsetting my wife and perhaps not managing to get anything
for dinner). This is a trivial example; it should be easy to work it
out. ... Not a bit of it. I have to work out the entire future of the
whole universe (possibly radically different in the two cases: remember
the butterfly effect), work out exactly how happy each person is in
each case and for how long, and add it all up. Good grief.

In practice, what the utilitarian recommends is entirely different.
I should make guesses as to the likely effects of the actions I'm
considering, estimate the resulting levels of happiness, and do the
best I can at adding them up in my head. Anything more is impossible,
and in any case I can't be blamed for things I can't predict.

That last remark, if actually made by a utilitarian, would amount to
an abandonment of one of the key principles of utilitarianism which
I haven't mentioned so far: you don't do things so as to have done
the Right Thing; you do them because that has results which are good.
(This is hard to explain; I apologise if I don't seem to be making
any sense.) In other words, when making an ethical decision you aren't
out to maximise your own righteousness: to the utilitarian, that is a
horribly selfish way of thinking. You're acting for the common good.

But we can't have it both ways. Either I take into account all the
effects of my actions (impossible), or I abandon the attempt to
maximise overall utility -- for the future consequences of my actions
are in most cases much greater than those in the foreseeable future.
Perhaps it's possible to get round this by claiming that there is
some irreducible random element in exactly what happens, and that
beyond some point in the future the consequences of my actions will
be swamped by the results of amplified random noise; if this is so,
I need only consider a finite portion of the future, and things look
less bleak.

If you are a Christian, or some other sort of non-utilitarian, you
have probably been reading the foregoing sections with either boredom
or glee, depending on whether you've already thought of all those
arguments against utilitarianism yourself. I'd now like to suggest
that there is much to be said in favour of utilitarianism, despite
its problems.

The first point is one I've made already: utilitarianism, in so
far as we can actually apply it (which means, in practice, only
looking at a small chunk of the future and only looking at a small
region of the universe), actually does a pretty good job of
giving answers to ethical questions. And, subject to those
approximations, it's quite easy. Most of us are capable of
guessing "what will happen if...", and of imagining others'
responses to the ensuing situations; and in many cases it's
possible to compare the resulting utilities without too much
trouble.

Secondly, utilitarianism provides a valuable corrective against
the sort of excessively rule-based ethics which come naturally
to the Christian, and perhaps to anyone who lives in a society
with a very well-defined set of laws. The two approaches to ethics
are complementary, and I think we need both.

Thirdly, considering "the greatest good of the greatest number"
can be an effective way of defeating prejudices and selfishness.
This ethical symmetry is, after all, quite close to such principles
as "Do to others as you would have them do to you" and "Love your
neighbour as yourself".

These last two points really go together. A great part of the
ethical teaching of Jesus consisted of pointing out that the
Scribes and Pharisees, in their devotion to the rules, were
losing sight of the importance of the welfare of others -- that
is, of utilitarian considerations. Of course the Christian
ethical system (in so far as there is one) goes way beyond
utilitarianism; but one cannot get beyond it without first
getting as far as it.

Fourthly, utilitarian arguments are, so to speak, portable. If you
need to discuss ethical questions with someone else who doesn't share
your system of ethics, you can often get some way towards agreement
by considering the utilitarian question first. Then you can discuss
the corrections that need to be made.

I haven't put forward a coherent system of ethics myself. I don't
have one. Still, it seems worthwhile to make a few suggestions and
observations.

I am, as has presumably been apparent for some time, a Christian.
This more or less commits me to a number of ethical propositions;
but it has little to say about the more abstract questions of what's
really going on "underneath". It is tempting to infer from the absence
of an ethical system in the Bible that there is none (beyond the
requirement to do the perhaps-opaque will of God); but there is no
justification for this, even if one takes a very high view of the
authority of Scripture. If you are going to rescue someone from
drowning, you just throw them a rope and tell them to grab it;
you don't try to give them swimming lessons.

Firstly, about rules. There are a lot of rules in the Bible,
and many Christian communities have come up with others (either
deduced from the ones in the Bible, or not). I distrust rules,
even when they come from the very most reliable sources. It seems
improbable to me that any finite collection of rules can really
give a perfectly accurate account of what one should and should not
do.

This is realised in practice (though often not in theory) by just
about everybody. This is why there are all those other rules which
aren't found in the Bible: "we can see that this must be right; it's
right for the same reason as <thing found in Bible> is right."

Anyway, what should an adequate theory of ethics look like? In the
first place, I think it has to consider both actions and
states-of-the-universe. In other words, an action can be good
or bad apart from its consequences, and a state of affairs can
be good or bad apart from its causes and the actions it tends
to produce.

Next, I think any theory of ethics has to acknowledge that happiness
and suffering are in themselves good and bad (respectively). This is
why utilitarianism does as well as it does. But clearly (well, it's
clear to me) happiness and suffering, pain and pleasure, aren't the
whole story. For instance, adding a component for accurate knowledge
provides, at one fell swoop, the wrongness of lying, the value of
education and the explanation of why it might be better to be an
unhappy Socrates than a contented pig. Possibly some sorts of
aesthetic quality could come in here; but I am inclined to say that
their moral value is purely a matter of their effects on people's
happiness and suchlike.

What about the rightness and wrongness of actions? Again, I think
there are probably several different factors here. One might be
obedience, or something of the sort: obedience to any proper
authority, and especially to God. Generosity, or kindness, or
something of the sort, could be another: these are really
qualities that apply to actions as well as to people. It's good
to be a generous sort of person; it's also good to do generous
things, whatever sort of person one is generally.

Of course (putting my Christian hat on) there is a lot more to
life than ethics; and an important part of the Christian message
is that one cannot really live a good life without the Spirit.
In other words -- well, sort of in other words -- ethics really
is much too complicated to be captured by any finite set of
principles, and we need some sort of direct connection with God,
who can see the whole thing without needing to parcel it up
into laws and principles. This is reminiscent of the theorem
in mathematics which says that there is no algorithm which
will reliably tell you whether an arbitrary statement of mathematics
is true or false. It would appear that there is also no algorithm
which will reliably tell you whether a given course of action is
right or wrong.

I am not a professional philosopher. The opinions expressed
above are not intended for use in the operation of safety-critical
facilities; any injury you may sustain by heeding them is your own
responsibility.

The essay was written several years ago (somewhere around 1990,
I think) and I wouldn't necessarily put everything the same way now
as I did then.

There is a thing called "rule utilitarianism"; every now and then
I get e-mail telling me I've neglected it. I have neglected it because
I think it deserves neglect; my apologies to any rule utilitarians
out there. (Rule utilitarianism, lightly caricatured, says that the
right way to live is as follows. First, adopt actual utilitarianism,
which rule utilitarians call "act utilitarianism", and use its principles
to decide on a set of rules you'll live by. Then forget all about
utilitarianism, and just follow the rules. Leaving aside the prima facie
absurdity of this scheme, it seems to me that if you fill in the details
then you end up either with nonsense or with act utilitarianism.)

I received the following delightful message from someone who
may possibly be called either Joel Cockhill or Patrick Smith:

I really do not think that it is fitting to write
essays on subjects that you do not properly understand and
then post them on the net simply causing confusion. Your essay
on Utilitarianism was most misleading containing many misunderstandings
of the thesis. If students were to read this it would confuse and
misinform. Please either research your pieces properly or stick
to subjects on which you are qualified to write.

My polite request for criticisms specific enough to heed or challenge
went unanswered. So, be it noted: Someone On The Net thinks that
my understanding is all wrong.